Ancestors

William Taft Daugherty

William Taft Daugherty was born in McMinn County, Tennessee, in the autumn of 1908, the son of George M. Daugherty and his wife Maggie Belle. Englewood, a small mill town in the county, was his home. He was named for William Howard Taft, who was elected President of the United States the month after he was born. The county's birth register gives the date as 23 September 1908 and spells the middle name Taff; his draft card and his death certificate give 23 October 1908.

On 17 January 1931, in McMinn County, he married Maude Marie Jeralds of Englewood. He was twenty two and she was about eighteen. Their son Billy Ronald Daugherty was born at Englewood on 17 November 1931.

By 1940 the family had moved to California. The census that year found William, Maude and Billy in the Inglewood Judicial Township of Los Angeles County, the South Bay district that takes in Gardena and Moneta. On 16 October 1940, the first day of the peacetime draft, William registered at Moneta.

By 1954 he was working as a mechanic. On 8 August 1954 his body was found beside the Texas and Pacific Railway, three miles south of Lodi, in Marion County, in the northeast corner of Texas near the Louisiana line. The county coroner, at Jefferson, ruled it an accident. He wrote that "physical facts indicate he was killed by falling", "alighting or by being thrown from a moving train". The Texas and Pacific was the railroad that ran from Louisiana across Texas to El Paso.

He was forty five, and the certificate calls him a married man. The space for his home address was left blank. The particulars were given by Mrs. Howard S. Cagle of Madisonville, Tennessee, in the county next to Englewood. His body went back to Tennessee, and on 14 August 1954 he was buried at home, in Sunrise Cemetery at Englewood.

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Cite: Heirology, "William Taft Daugherty (1908-1954)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-taft-daugherty-1908-1954-0ea80b.